Soviet Concept of Human Rights and Legal System
The Soviet conception of human rights was different from conceptions prevalent in the West. According to Western legal theory, "it is the individual who is the beneficiary of human rights which are to be asserted against the government", whereas Soviet theory states that society as a whole is the beneficiary. Within the Soviet Union, emphasis was placed on economic and social rights such as access to health care, adequate nutrition, education at all levels, and guaranteed employment. The government of the Soviet Union considered these to be the most important rights, without which political and civil rights were meaningless.
It was argued in the West that the Soviets rejected the Western concept of the "rule of law" as the belief that law should be more than just the instrument of politics; the Soviet view on rights was criticized for considering the Marxist–Leninist ideology above natural law.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights In The Soviet Union
Famous quotes containing the words legal system, soviet, concept, human, rights, legal and/or system:
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“One difference between Nazi and Soviet camps was that in the latter dying was a slower process.”
—Terrence Des Pres (1939–1987)
“Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“All who wish to hand down to their children that happy republican system bequeathed to them by their revolutionary fathers, must now take their stand against this consolidating, corrupting money power, and put it down, or their children will become hewers of wood and drawers of water to this aristocratic ragocracy.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)